Terrance Graham was a bad kid. No one's disputing that. At 16, he and some of his buddies robbed a barbecue restaurant in Jacksonville, Florida. In the process, they bashed the manager on the head with a steel bar, hurting but not killing him. Graham got a year in jail and three years probation for that. But soon after he got out, he joined two older guys in a couple of armed robberies.

Graham was still a minor at the time, too young to vote, serve on a jury or join the Army. But he drew an adult-sized punishment. The Florida courts ruled he should stay in prison until he dies.

Terrance Graham, two months
before his 16th birthday

Graham is one of at least 1,755 Americans serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole for crimes committed while they were under age 18. The U.S. is almost alone in the world in handing out this particular punishment; it was the only country to vote against a 2006 United Nations resolution calling for its abolition.

Life without parole for juveniles caught on during the hysteria over crack and youth gangs in the 1980s, part of a wave of tough-on-crime legislation that has quadrupled America's prison population to a record-shattering 2.3 million inmates. Almost every state as well as the federal government permits it. But now, with crime rates far lower, that punishment is coming under fire from a growing number of lawmakers, jurists, activists and even crime victims. Today the debate reaches a head as the Supreme Court takes up Graham's case and another, involving Joe Sullivan, who was convicted of burglary and rape at age 13.

The issue is not whether young offenders should be punished; it's only whether they should be given the chance to someday make the case that they've changed their ways. Graham and Sullivan are going to court with the support of an impressive array of groups, including, in addition to the predictable human rights outfits, the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychological Association. Their basic argument is that no matter what the crime, it makes no sense to declare anyone that young beyond hope of reform. After all, the whole reason we have a separate system of juvenile justice is precisely because of the notion that young people can change.

"There is a simple reason the criminal justice system should treat juveniles and adults differently: Kids are a helluva lot dumber than adults," summed up Alan Simpson in a recent Washington Post editorial. Simpson is himself a former juvenile offender who grew up to be a Republican Senator representing Wyoming. "They do stupid things—as I did—and some even commit serious crimes," wrote Simpson. "But youths don't really ever think through the consequences."

That's a notion solidly backed by science. Researchers have established that juveniles' brains are less developed than adults' in key areas important for controlling impulsive behavior, thinking ahead, and resisting pressure from others. "That doesn't excuse kids who commit crimes, but it should affect our judgment about how responsible they are," says Dr. Laurence Steinberg, a professor of adolescent psychology at Temple University. "It's not necessarily relevant to determining their guilt, but it is for their sentencing."

The Supreme Court itself accepted that logic in 2005, when it abolished the death penalty for juveniles. As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion: "The reality that juveniles still struggle to define their identity means it is less supportable to conclude that even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile is evidence of irretrievably depraved character. . . . It would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor's character deficiencies will be reformed."

That ruling has provided powerful ammunition to sentencing reformers. It even convinced politicians in law-and-order loving Texas, where the legislature this year banned life without parole for juveniles. "If the U.S. Supreme Court said to Texas and all the other states, 'You cannot give these juvenile offenders the death penalty', then I believe the state of Texas should not be sending them to prison for life without parole," declared state Sen. Juan Hinojosa in introducing the bill earlier this year.

Colorado took a similar step in 2006, and Montana recently changed its laws to open the possibility of parole for some juvenile lifers. Bills seeking to eliminate the sentence, or at least narrow those to whom it can be applied, have also been introduced in Congress, as well as the state legislatures of California, Florida, Michigan, and at least 8 other states. And last April, a California appellate court struck down a life without parole sentence imposed on a man for a kidnapping he was involved in at age 14, declaring it to be unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.

Not everybody's cheering those developments, of course. "Most juveniles are capable of reform, but a small minority commit horrendous crimes, and the juvenile justice system is incapable of dealing with them, " says Charles Stimson, a former prosecutor and current Heritage Foundation researcher. "The only way to protect ourselves from the worst of the worst is to lock them up for their natural lives."

It's easy to see his point. The roster of underage lifers includes a 16-year-old who murdered both her parents, a boy the same age who stabbed a middle-aged couple to death in their beds while he was robbing their home, and a 14-year-old who set fire to his neighbor's house, burning its 4 occupants to death.

Most juvenile lifers were convicted on murder charges. But according to a 2009 Florida State University study, 111 of them—including Graham and Sullivan—committed lesser crimes that did not result in a death. And a 2005 report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found that more than a quarter of all juvenile lifers were convicted essentially as accessories to murders they were present for but didn't personally commit—which can sometimes mean just having been in the room or the car when the deed went down.

Even those who kill are not always the hardened, repeat offenders that life without parole laws were intended for. Consider the case of Sara Kruzan, a California woman who was forced into prostitution at age 13. After three years of sexual and physical abuse, she finally worked up the courage to shoot her pimp. She's locked up for life as a result. A recent study by the Alabama-based Equal Rights Initiative, a nonprofit legal outfit that is representing Graham, found 73 cases of life-without sentences imposed on kids who were only 13 or 14 at the time of their crime.

The Supreme Court may not settle the issue completely. Their ruling might apply only to juvenile life without parole sentences for non-homicide offenses, or set a minimum age below which the sentence cannot be applied.

Even if they do strike down life without parole for minors across the board, no one will get out of prison right away as a result. All they'll win is the right to a hearing—someday. Texas and Colorado's laws, for instance, allow kids sentenced to life to seek parole only after serving 40 years.

"What Graham and Sullivan's lawyers are arguing for isn't really that much," says University of Miami juvenile law professor Stephen Harper. "If a kid is dangerous, you don't let him out. If he's not—you punish him, but you don't lock him up and throw away the key."

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.